Daniel Reetz, the founder of the DIY Book Scanner community, has recently started making videos of prototyping and shop tips. If you are tinkering with a book scanner (or any other project) in your home shop, these tips will come in handy. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn0gq8 ... g_8K1nfInQ

Copyright in the United States runs for 70 years after the death of the author. Anything published before 1923 is out of copyright. I suspect that it can be more complicated in some cases, but that is the basic.

I can understand why digitizing books would be expensive. Scanning the books and converting them to text is relatively quick. Then in order to get them to read correctly it takes a significant effort to edit them and make all the corrections that are introduced by the OCR software. I can do the scan and conversion in a couple of hours on a 200 to 300 page book. After that I takes many hours of editing. Personally I would not do it for less than about $10 US per page, minimum of 100 pages. And if I tried it I suspect that if anything the price would go up.

I personally have been digitizing some books from my personal library, for my personal use. The books I am digitizing are ones that I cannot find in digital format. If I digitize one and then it becomes available I will buy it. In fact this happened once. They are also books that I want to read. There have been a couple of books that I started to digitize and got into them and found I could not manage to read them enough times to finish the editing, so they went onto the back log. If I was doing it for somebody else I would wind up having to do it anyway and that would mean reading a book that I didn't like multiple times to get all the editing done.

Google has been taken to court about that. They won. The idea is, I believe, that they are archiving the books, not selling them. I am not completely sure about the technicalities involved. Anyway, as I understand it, if somebody digitizes a book for distribution then that would be a copyright infringement.

There is, or was, at least one company that would digitize a book for you. They required you to provide the book, and when they had finished digitizing it they destroyed the original. Apparently they thought that this was sufficient to avoid copyright infringement.

Another approach is that you can make one copy for your own use as an archive. This follows a precedent set for video tapes. The courts determined that if somebody bought a tape they could make a copy for archival purposes. I'm not sure whether this has been through the court system, so I don't know if it will actually hold.

In my case I am not distributing the books I digitize. I am using them for my own purpose. If somebody finds out that I have digitized a book to which they own the copyright I will happily pay them for the privilege. In fact if I knew who owns the copyright to a book that I have digitized I would be happy to share the digital book with them so that they could sell it to others.

Please remember that I am not a copyright lawyer. I am basing my ideas on things I have picked up here and there. They may or may not be accurate. The main thing to remember is that copyright law is tricky. I personally would not be comfortable digitizing books that were checked out of the library, unless they were published before 1923. Here in the US that is sufficient. In other countries copyright law varies a lot and it may be that none of what I have said applies outside the USA.